


the heart, poor old wound

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Series: in heaven there is no change [1]
Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Corpses, F/M, Incest, Miscarriage, post-The Borgia Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 12:37:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9385499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: In the last hour of Borgia rule in Rome, Lucrezia takes her brother’s head in her hands and kisses him. He is hot with fever, and his palm feels like a brand pressed to her heart. “Don’t go,” he says, stricken. “Sis.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set directly after the last Cesare/Lucrezia scene in "The Borgia Apocalypse." 
> 
> For those of you who don't KNOW about The Borgia Apocalypse, it's Neil Jordan's screenplay for the Borgias movie he wanted to make but couldn't, and you can buy it on Amazon as an ebook. (I for one really loved it!) 
> 
> For those of you who don't want to read it, let me sum up the relevant parts: Micheletto and Cesare reconcile, Cesare and Rodrigo get malaria, Rodrigo dies, Della Rovere becomes the Pope, Lucrezia breaks up with Cesare in order to be happy and live her life. 
> 
> I know absolutely no things about Renaissance Italy except for what I learned on The Borgias itself, and I was pretty distracted by Holliday Grainger's face the whole time, so. Know that. 
> 
> I think that's everything?

_Jesus put His mouth to Lazarus’s_  
_and a current shot between them for a moment._  
_Then came tenderness._  
_Jesus rubbed all the flesh of Lazarus_  
_and at last the heart, poor old wound,_  
_started up in spite of itself._  
  
*  
  
In the last hour of Borgia rule in Rome, Lucrezia takes her brother’s head in her hands and kisses him. He is hot with fever, and his palm feels like a brand pressed to her heart. “Don’t go,” he says, stricken. “Sis.”  
  
She has shed all the tears she can bear to today. She pulls his hand away from her heart and presses one last, fierce kiss to his knuckles. “Goodbye, my brother,” she whispers, and leaves him.  
  
She manages two steps past Micheletto, standing guard on the other side of the door, before she thinks _I shall never see him again_ , and her knees buckle. Micheletto is there instantly, steadying her. She focuses on drawing in one breath after another without becoming distracted by the terrified hammer of her heartbeat. When it no longer seems a struggle, he lets her go.  
  
“Keep him safe, if you can,” she tells him quietly, staring ahead at nothing. The long and empty hall, the heavy doors she must walk through.  
  
“My lady,” Micheletto answers her, inclining his head.  
  
She tightens her jaw, and leaves him.   
  
*  
  
She is married in Ferrara, and she is determined to like it. It is the first time she has been mistress of a castle in more than name; she was a prisoner in Pesaro, a hostage in Naples, and always a daughter in Rome. In Ferrara she is to be the duchessa. She believes it will suit her.  
  
The duke is everything Pietro Bembo promised he would be: nearly forty years old, without serious political ambition, a great patron of the arts, and thoroughly enamored with his favorite, a beautiful youth only a few years older than Lucrezia herself. But the duke is kind, and there are hardly any sins that trouble Lucrezia any longer; sodomy feels quite tame in comparison to incest. She makes a point of befriending both the duke and his favorite before the day of the wedding, using every inch of Borgia charm at her disposal.  
  
On her wedding night, she puts on a fresh silk shift, washes her skin with rose oil as La Bella Farnese taught her, arranges her hair so it hangs like a sheet of beaten gold over her white back, and then sends the servants away. When her husband enters the room, she is wrapped up in a plain robe, waiting for him in front of the fire with a glass of Valencian wine.  
  
“Would my lord like some wine?” she asks. “It is the last bottle from my father’s vineyards. A good year, they tell me.”  
  
“A very good year,” the duke confirms when he has tasted it. There is a familiar resignation in his expression that Lucrezia would very much like to banish.  
  
“My lord,” she says, taking his hands. “May we be frank with each other, now we are married?”  
  
“I think we must be,” the duke says, and draws in a slow breath. “You know I need an heir.”  
  
“Indeed you do,” Lucrezia says, and sips at her wine.  
  
“An heir of my body,” the duke stresses slightly, giving her a weary smile back. “After which point, I trust you will have no objection to keeping your own company.”  
  
“None whatsoever,” Lucrezia assures him. “Although I would like to be friends. Were you friends with your last wife?”  
  
The duke’s expression does not change. “I am very much afraid I was not, Lucrezia Borgia.”  
  
“Lucrezia d’Este,” she corrects him, although it doesn’t yet feel like the truth. She has always been a Borgia. “That is a pity, my lord.”  
  
“A great one,” he agrees, mildly.  
  
“I have a solution to the problem, if you’d like to hear it,” she informs him, and takes another pleasant sip of wine after he nods. “Given the particulars of our situation, I suggest we make a few private vows to each other, in addition to the usual ones.” The wedding negotiations took place months earlier, of course, and she is already assured of a recognized place for Giovanni in her life, and set the measure of her private allowance, and all such matters. The marital bed is harder to mediate, although she is armed with every trick of beauty and bluntness Giulia Farnese ever gave her.  
  
Very prettily, she lays out the promises she is willing to make: until she is brought to bed of a male heir, she will receive no other lover, and give no cause for speculation that the child is not the duke’s. She will avoid scandal, she will never interfere with his passions or his favorites, she will attempt to make their marital duties as pleasurable as possible, she will do everything to ensure the swift arrival of a son.  
  
The duke’s eyebrows rise and rise as she speaks, but she has the measure of him right; he is grinning at her by the end. “The terms are agreeable so far,” he tells her. “What concessions would you ask of me?”  
  
Lucrezia puts her wine down on the floor, and takes her husband’s hands. “Only that you allow me to do whatever I please,” she says seriously. “So long as it cause no scandal. I have been a prisoner too many times, in a husband’s house. I would like to remain free.” Free to love where she will, fuck where she will, play with whom she will and dream of what she will. The freedom neither husband nor father nor brother had ever been able to offer her.

The duke does not laugh at her, as even Cesare might have. Who would question the duchessa of Ferrara’s freedom? “I agree to your terms,” he tells her sincerely, and rises that much in her estimation.  
  
“Excellent,” she says, and rises from the fire. “Then we may as well indulge ourselves, my lord,” she says, and knocks twice on the adjoining door. It opens to reveal the duke’s favorite, blushing hard and unable to meet her eyes.  
The duke gives a quiet laugh. “I thought you were to take no other into your bed?” he asks her, taking the boy by the hand and drawing him into the room.  
  
Lucrezia shuts the door. “Perhaps my lord has forgotten,” she says innocently. “This is _your_ bed.”  
  
* 

She slips out of her husband’s bed in the early hours of the morning, returns to the dark chambers where the duchessa of Ferrara sleeps. It was exactly what she had wished her wedding night to be. They had laughed, the three of them, and each taken their pleasure, and when the duke finished in her she had joked that it felt like a son. Her husband is exactly as she wished him to be.  
  
She curls up alone in her cold bed, closes her eyes, and allows herself to remember her last wedding night, her brother’s arms tight around her, how it had felt like welcoming a lost piece of herself home. She sobs once, and then shuts up the memory where it belongs, in a locked chest in the innermost chamber of her heart.  
  
*  
  
The first thing Lucrezia does with her freedom is devote herself to studying healing. She has been learning it piecemeal for years, worrying bits of knowledge away from Micheletto, thumbing through Galen whenever she could find the time. The allure of poison and antidote have called to her for too many years, offered her too many kinds of ruin and salvation.  
  
The castle dottore is a very learned scholar and a very dignified old man. He is very scandalized by the new duchessa’s interest in his craft. He attempts to prescribe her a soothing posset every time she visits him, but Lucrezia is relentless in her efforts: she accepts the posset each time, and makes him explain each ingredient—their use and effect, where they might be found, what was done to alter them—and then merrily sends her maid to dispose of them when she has learned all she wishes. She supplements this bullying with flattery and interest and regular offerings of expensive wine, and soon the dottore grudgingly permits her to follow him about his work.  
  
The castle inhabitants soon grow used to the sight of their duchessa with a white veil wrapped over her face to protect her from miasma hovering at the edges of their sickrooms. The duke puts in an expensive order for medical texts from a bookseller in Florence; Lucrezia learns all the common illnesses and their cures, becomes fascinated with the internal geography of the body.  
  
She makes her dottore give a public dissection, a thing the venerable old man had not participated in since his student days, and pours her aristocratic influence into the affair until it becomes a sort of delicious spectacle. The artists of her husband’s studiola attend with great interest, speeches are made about inspiring the youth of Ferrara to the noble career of medicine, a feast is ordered in celebration, the bishop is scandalized. Lucrezia watches the dissection intently from her ducal box, her face shining with interest.  
  
Later, she convinces her dottore to hold a private dissection, and then she makes him hand her the scalpel. She remembers a joke Cesare had with Micheletto, about doctoring—something about surgeons and assassins, and thankless tasks. _And how is the patient?_ her brother would ask, reading some dark tiding in the flat expression on his manservant’s face. _Dead, my lord,_ would come the reply, provoking the laugh Cesare only gave to Micheletto, delighted and vicious. He always tried to be gentler with her. _Thank you, dottore,_ Cesare would answer. _I’m sure you did your best_. She has a sudden, violent pang of missing Micheletto, his steady presence and unswerving loyalty. She is sure there is no one else in the world who loves her brother so much, now that her father is dead and she is gone. She bites her tongue until the ache of homesickness passes, returns her attention to the scalpel in her hand.  
  
The body Lucrezia has at her mercy belongs to a young man she is told died in a tavern brawl; there is a single wound at his thigh, which happened to catch the main artery. He would have been dead within minutes. Aside from the wound, he looks perfectly clean and whole—but of course he has been washed and prepared for her. His hair is dark, his skin olive. He has what she would call a Spanish look about him. She opens him up with a steady hand, under her dottore’s direction. He helps her crack open the ribs and inspect the complex machinery of the torso.  
  
“So this is a heart,” Lucrezia says, and carefully cuts it out of the chest. She cups the red thing in her hands, feels the weight of it. She drops it into the waiting dish, and gives the dottore a bright, false smile. “Not so heavy after all,” she says, and her voice comes out breathless, wistful.  
  
She washes her bloodied hands in a golden basin, stitches the body back up with plain black thread. “In four years I think I’ll know just as much about the human body as you,” she tells the dottore, for something to say.  
  
“In four years, you will know as much as any scholar in Italy,” the doctor tells her drily.

  
*  
  
She learns that the Duke of Valentino is to be imprisoned in Spain a week after she learns that Micheletto Corella has been made a permanent resident of the Castel St Angelo.  
  
She visits the village midwife the next morning, her eyes still raw from weeping the night before, and coolly demands a lesson in midwifery.  
  
*  
  
Two years to the day since she last saw her brother, she recognizes her own symptoms, and goes running to her husband. “You have got a child in me at last,” she tells him, laughing with delight, and is showered with the congratulations of the entire studiola. Pietro Bembo promises to craft her a sonnet to mark the occasion; her husband orders another feast.  
  
“Pietro Bembo is in love with you,” the duke tells her casually during the dancing, when Lucrezia is slumped breathlessly against him, having just been returned from a lavolta.  
  
“Yes, I know,” Lucrezia says, watching Pietro lift one of her ladies into the air. Every so often he gives her a yearning glance from across the floor. “I receive a poem every week informing me of it, at least.”  
  
“Will you put him out of his misery, now that you are with child?” the duke asks in a light way, and Lucrezia frowns. “Amusing as his verses are, there can be no danger of illegitimacy _now_.”  
  
“I had not thought of it,” she admits. She has not been lonely, this past year—she has indulged in Sapphic pleasure for the most part. Her sister in law employs a very agreeable maidservant, which has made every otherwise onerous familial visit pleasant indeed. Once or twice she has let Pietro love her with his mouth, but the only man she has known as a husband is the duke. “And anyway, I am not in love with Pietro Bembo.”  
  
“You should be in love with someone,” the duke says decisively. “You are young, you are surrounded by a court who adores you. Be _happy_ , Lucrezia.”  
  
Lucrezia laughs and makes a face at him. “I _am_ happy,” she insists.  
  
*  
  
She discusses the new baby with Giovanni that night, banishing the nurse so she can tuck him into bed herself. After confirming that she will not love the new baby more than she loves him, and that it could be a sister _or_ a brother, her little son is satisfied.  
  
Lucrezia is not.  
  
She lies down on the bed next to him, looks into his dark, serious eyes. “Do you remember your Uncle Cesare, my dearest?” she asks him softly.  
  
He nods solemnly, and something loosens in her chest. “What do you remember?” she asks, taking his small hand in one of hers.  
  
“He was very big,” Giovanni tells her dutifully, and she smiles.  
  
“He was, wasn’t he?” she says.  
  
“He brought me sweetmeats,” Giovanni continues, and she confirms this too, laughing. She remembers reaching a hand into the pocket of his cardinal robes and finding nothing but sticky twists of torone inside.  
  
“He had funny red hair,” Giovanni continues, and her laughter stops dead in her chest. Micheletto had been so often with them. In Naples and in Rome. “I liked him.”  
  
“Yes, my love,” she whispers, the words aching in her suddenly tight throat. She doesn’t correct him, but gathers him into her arms, buries her face in his soft black curls. “I liked him, too.”

*  
  
There is a room in the center of the palace made entirely of alabaster, where her husband keeps the treasures of the studiola: a bacchanal by Titian, scenes from the Aenaiad from Dosso Dossi. Sometimes he takes golden-haired Carlo there, she knows, and fucks him under the masterpieces painted onto the gilt ceiling, angels and Greeks looking down on them.  
  
Lucrezia tried it herself, once, with the Lady Isabella’s maid. The light of their candles illuminated strange flickering mysteries in the art, had given a disconcertingly hallowed quality to their love. Angela had wept, and Lucrezia kissed the tears from her face. When she recovered, the girl began to stumble her way through a confession, but Lucrezia stopped her with one finger against her mouth.  
  
“You mustn’t love me, Angela,” she said, and pulled one of the girl’s white hands up to her own chest, pressing it to her skin. “Can’t you feel this?”  
  
“It is your heart, my lady,” Angela said, her gaze dropping to Lucrezia’s mouth.  
  
Lucrezia shook her head. “It is a muscle,” she said. “It beats with blood, and it keeps me alive. That’s all I need it for—all the use I shall ever get from it.” She let Angela’s hand fall away, looked at her gravely. “Do you understand?”  
  
“My lady will never love?” Angela whispered, the long shadows from their candles playing over her face.  
  
Lucrezia smiled wistfully. “Your lady will never love _again_ ,” she corrected.  
  
*  
  
She writes to her friends in Rome, not for the first time, pleading Micheletto’s case. For the first time in months, she receives a response from Machiavelli. Signor Corella did not break on the rack, and the pope’s patience is not without limit. He makes no promises, but there is hope yet.  
  
She hears nothing of her entreaties on Cesare’s behalf. 

*  
  
When her belly starts to round, she finds herself unable to sleep. She takes to walking the battlements at night, her hands pressed to the little swell of her child within her, and lets herself think of things she would never share with her husband, or her lovers.  
  
Cesare’s daughter is a baby now in Navarre. The reports Lucrezia has heard of her niece say she has curling black hair, and has already spoken her first words in sweet infant French. Her name is Louise, and she will never know her aunt, never meet her cousins. She has never met her father.  
  
Cesare used her as a tool against Lucrezia once, before she was ever born. Louise was to be a chain binding her to Cesare, a baby for Giovanni to play with, part of the shared Borgia future. It would have worked; she would have loved Louise Borgia as surely as she loves her son.

But the pope in Rome is Julius, her brother is a prisoner in Spain, and the child stirring in her belly will belong to Ferrara and his father, and despite her best efforts, she will then be bound to Ferrara by love.  
  
It’s the fate of all wives, to lose who they were. To wake one day with a new name and new loyalties, and find that the new family has supplanted the old. She has resisted it for ten years and three weddings, but now at last her new self is growing inside her: Lucrezia d’Este in truth as well as name.  
  
When she holds the baby in her arms–-Alfonso d’Este, Paolo d’Este, Jofré d’Este—she thinks perhaps the Borgias will lose their claim on her at last. With her child in her arms, she might finally cut that golden thread that stretches from the aching hollow under her ribcage out over the battlements into the distant night, ending in a savage knot at her brother’s heart.  
  
She is not sure if she longs for it or fears it.  
  
*  
  
The baby is stillborn.   
  
The midwife and dottore who have been her teachers both attend her, and so she knows that God has failed her before they show her the infant, before the pain has even stopped. She knows their faces, knows their tricks.  
  
Lucrezia lies in the bed she made for herself, the world of knowledge and desire and friendship and art that she beat into the shape she wanted, and is stricken by terrible laughter, great heaving sobs that shake her body and leave her struggling for air. She presses both hands to her chest, like she is staunching a wound.  
  
“Spain,” she tells her husband finally, when she is too exhausted to laugh any longer. “I must go to Spain. I would see my brother again.”

He is silent too long, and the first tired tear slips down her cheek. “Is it so impossible?” she asks, and knows the answer, has known it since she was fifteen years old. Love is always impossible. The world was not made for her.  
  
*  
  
She recovers. She does not go to Spain. She becomes the patroness of a new studio for sculpture. She watches her son play in warm afternoons, running through cool fountains with the children of the castello. She lets Pietro Bembo kiss her and kiss her in bright gardens, under the light of the midday sun.  
  
“Do you like me, Pietro Bembo?” she asks him.  
  
“No one has loved as I love you,” he promises her fervently. “You are the food and sustenance of my soul, Lucrezia Borgia. If you banned me from your sight, I would live and thrive on the mere memory of you as other men do on their souls.”  
  
She gives him a weary smile, and kisses his cheek. “I am glad you like me,” she says softly.  
  
Word from Spain reaches her in the spring: Cesare has escaped his prison. He is rumored to be with his brother-in-law in Navarre. She wonders if he has met his daughter yet.  
  
*

The dottore allows her to assist in an amputation as a special favor. The thrill and horror of it fills her with a life she hasn’t felt since the birth. The dottore compliments her stiches, afterward, the steadiness of her hand.  
  
She goes to the studiola with a new understanding of suffering, and spends a fortnight merrily criticizing every painting of the crucifixion under construction. She persuades several of the younger apprentices to accompany her to the next surgery, sketchbooks in hand.  
  
* 

The bishop of Ferrara has no great love for her, and not merely because she is still a Borgia—her unseemly interest in the masculine arts of medicine and anatomy verges on the heretical, as he often reminds her. He has no idea how far her passion goes, or she would hear much more of it—perhaps even draw the disapproving eye of Rome back upon her, but her public interest is enough to spark his displeasure. She attends mass every Sunday with faultless posture and a fixed smile, no matter what insinuations are uttered at the pulpit. She acquires a reputation for piety.  
  
One particular Sunday, as she walks down the steps of the church, a dirty hand reaches out and grasps her sleeve. She is used to such occurrences, although the duke’s manservant usually prevents beggars and the like from touching her. She is already reaching for her coin purse when she really looks at the man, and her breath stops dead in her chest.  
  
It is Micheletto.

“Can you meet me here after dark?” he asks her, blue eyes steady on hers.  
  
She jerks her head in a nod, and before he can melt back into the crowd she makes a wild grab for his arm and catches him, her fingers clawing over his wrist. She can’t speak yet, her heart pounding too loudly in her ears and throat.  
  
“Tonight,” Micheletto repeats, more gently. He doesn’t look behind her, but she knows her attendants have noticed him. Her breath shakes with the effort, but she manages to loosen her grip. An instant later he is gone.  
  
The rest of the day passes in a terrifying fog. She cannot eat, she cannot read, she cannot hear a single thing anyone says to her, every molecule of her being waiting for nightfall.  
  
No one appears to be waiting at the church when she finally returns, but as soon as she draws even with the church steps, Micheletto unfolds himself from a patch of shadow.

She does not wait to hear what instruction he will give her next. She flings herself at him, Cesare’s Micheletto, the closest she has been to anyone in her family in three years. He is stiff in her embrace, but after a moment he awkwardly returns it.  
  
“Is he safe,” she breathes into Micheletto’s ear, hope and fear warring in her chest. “Oh, is he here? Tell me, tell me.”  
  
Micheletto carefully pulls away from her, holding her at arm’s length. “He’s safe,” he says, dropping it into the space between them like a stone, and she sags with relief. His hands tighten on her shoulders in alarm, and she laughs breathlessly.  
  
“I’m fine,” she says, still looking at him hungrily. “Is he here, Micheletto?”  
  
Micheletto steps away in answer, the angle of his jaw a clear invitation to follow. She does, shivering with every step. He leads her on a winding path through the city, and finally stops by a small house lit up from the inside.  
  
“Here,” he says, and waits for her.  
  
She walks through the door, and standing on the other side of the room is Cesare, dreadfully thin and visibly exhausted, a new scar crossing his brow, but her _Cesare_ , the other half of her soul in the room with her at last. “Brother,” she says out loud, and it emerges from her throat on a moan.  
  
His face crumples for an instant, and in three strides he is at her side, his well-loved hands shoving her into the wall, his mouth crashing down onto hers. She kisses him back just as frantically, kisses him everywhere she can reach—his mouth, his chin, his cheek, his eyes. She drags him impossibly closer, gets his ragged breath back on her tongue, swallows his every attempt to say her name. After a small eternity he falls to his knees and presses his face to her stomach, hands cradling her hips. “Lucrezia,” he says at last, and she realizes she is weeping, crying into his dear black hair.  
  
*  
  
She breaks her promise to her husband that night, without regret.  
  
With Cesare caught in her arms, mouthing inaudible words at her neck, it occurs to Lucrezia with a wretched throb of loss that she misses her entire family—her poor father, her mother, lost Gioffre, Juan. She never said goodbye to any of them. She never thought she’d lose them. And now her father is dead and Juan is dead and she has not seen her mother in three years, Gioffre in almost six. She tightens her whole body around Cesare’s, her hands digging into his back and thighs clenching around his waist, and he sucks in a shocked breath.  
  
“Being with you,” she says shakily, hardly able to speak but needing to tell him, “it’s like, like being home.” It’s more than that: being with him is like being Lucrezia Borgia again, knowing exactly who she is, down to her bones and blood.  
  
Cesare gives her a brief, anguished look, and she remembers that he hasn’t been home for years either. With their father dead, they have no home. She kisses him in apology, urges him on until he shudders against her.  
  
When they are exhausted, she and Cesare lie together in a stranger’s bed, his heartbeat under her ear and his arm around her waist and his mouth at her brow, as familiar as if she’d left him thus a night before instead of three years ago.  
  
“I missed you, sis,” Cesare says simply, lifting up her hand to press an exact kiss to the center of her palm. “Every day.”  
  
“I missed you,” she tells him, her voice cracking with the truth of it. “I thought I might die of it.”  
  
“Never,” he says, and kisses the shell of her ear, the very corner of her jaw. She shivers into him, twists in his arms so she can curl one hand into his hair.

“But I will love you ‘til I die,” she tells him gravely. “You must never doubt me again.”  
  
He draws in an uneven breath, and does not deny it. She strokes his hair like a mother would, unsure if she is asking for forgiveness or offering it.  
  
“Micheletto must take you back,” he says eventually. “You will be missed.”  
  
*

She finds Micheletto sitting outside on the stoop, his cloak wrapped around him.  
  
“Have you been out here all night?” she asks, unembarrassed. Micheletto has known the way it is between them for years.  
  
He shrugs. “It is not so cold,” he says.  
  
“You’re an awful liar,” she says, and tucks her arm in his. “Next time you must come inside.”  
  
“I think not, my lady,” he says dryly, and she laughs. They walk together in silence for a time, the dark city sleeping all around them.  
  
“How long do I have,” she asks when she can see the church steps again.  
  
“A week,” he tells her, after a short pause. “Not much more than that.”  
  
*  
  
She sees him again the next day, and the next. She takes him and Micheletto riding in the forest, the way she took her poor Narcissus, and sits with him in the sunshine, looks at him in daylight.  
  
She puts her head in his lap and plays with his hands and asks Micheletto if he has ever held a human heart in his hands, is delighted when he reports that he has not. She brags to them about her studies of the body, of sickness and health, labels every part of the body for Cesare’s breathless amusement, holds a spirited discussion with Micheletto on the weakest parts of the flesh.  
  
She does not ask him about imprisonment, and he does not tell her. Instead, he tells her of the future, spins bright, impossible webs of what could be, fairly shining with schemes and stratagems: he will go to Navarre, he will present himself to King Ferdinand and their family in Valencia, he will reclaim his honor and his lands. Micheletto watches him silently, the old exhausted devotion plain on his face.

She touches Cesare’s jaw with her fingertips. “But what of my fishing village?” she says lightly. “What about changing our names and living in obscurity?” She feels herself pulled back to those days before her wedding, when all she had wanted was for Cesare to touch her. “You could be a fisherman, and between the two of us, Micheletto and I could be a doctor.”  
  
“You wouldn’t like obscurity,” Micheletto says unexpectedly. He still rarely volunteers speech. “Nor would my lord.”  
  
Cesare kisses her fingers.  
  
“You are right,” she says, and rests her head on his shoulder. “Cesare must always be a Borgia.”  
  
Cesare does not say: _and_ _so must you_.  
  
She smiles brightly at Micheletto and tells him about the alabaster room, the improvement in the crucifixions she has overseen, her neat stitches at the amputation.  
  
*  
  
She takes Giovanni with her, the day before they depart, the four of them gathered in Lucrezia’s favorite clearing with a picnic basket slung over Micheletto’s shoudlers. Cesare’s eyes go pink with tears as soon as he looks at her son. Giovanni is shy with him, looking away even when Cesare kneels down carefully to greet him. Micheletto swings the boy up into his arms as soon as Cesare is done with him, and Giovanni shrieks with familiar delight.  
  
She and Cesare watch as Micheletto walks Giovanni to the edge of the pond, both of them squatting down to look solemnly at frogs. Cesare wraps his arms tight around her waist, making himself a pillar to lean against, and she relaxes wholly into him.  
  
“We leave tomorrow,” he murmurs, turning his face briefly into her hair.  
  
“Yes,” she agrees. “I know you must.”  
  
“But I would know first,” he says in a low voice. “Are you happy here, sis?”  
  
“Oh my brother,” she says sadly, and twists in his arms so she can see his dear face, his serious eyes fixed on her. She reaches up to cradle his face in her hands. “I have never been happier in my life.”  
  
Giovanni’s laughter drifts up from the pond. Cesare swallows hard, but he nods. He reaches out and splays one warm hand over her heart. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you,” he tells her. It’s a lie, but she loves him more than God, her dark and terrible brother trying not to weep, so she allows it.  
  
“I built the world I wanted,” she says. “It was not easy, and it is not perfect, but is _mine_.”  
  
“And you are content,” her brother says, looking at her with a concentrated devotion, his brows drawn together.  
  
_And I will survive the loss of you,_ she wants to tell him. She will survive the golden thread of _Borgia_ always pulling tight somewhere in her, an ache she will never be rid of. Her heart will keep beating, scarred but whole, a healed wound.      
  
“And I am content,” she tells her brother softly, and there in the sunlight she kisses him, tender as anything. There in the sunlight, with their family playing in the distance, it is the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear to god this is gonna have a Micheletto/Cesare companion fic soon. Hold me to this. It's gonna happen. 
> 
> The poem fragment/title is from "Jesus Summons Forth" by Anne Sexton.
> 
> Anyway I love The Borgias so much, please come scream with me at wildehacked.tumblr.com should you feel so moved. 
> 
> All feedback v much appreciated. <3


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